The Philosophy of the Upanishads c7.s3.18

c7.s3.18

Christianity teaches in spirit, even if not always in the letter, that man as such is capable only of sinful, that is selfish actions (Rom. 7¹⁸), and that all good whether of purpose or achievement can only be wrought in us by God (Phil. 2¹³). Clearly as this doctrine—for him who has eyes to see—is formulated not so much in individual expressions as rather in the entire system as such, yet it has been difficult at all times for the Church to rest satisfied with it. She has sought perpetually an opportunity of co-ordinating her own imperfect remedial measures, and of leaving open a side-door for human co-operation,—clearly because behind the sole operative power which makes God the source of all good she saw standing like a frightful apparition the grim monstrosity of predestination. And indeed this presents itself as an inevitable consequence as soon as we connect the Christian conception of the sole agency of God, as profound as it is true, with the Jewish realism adopted from the Old Testament, which sets God and man over-against one another as two mutually exclusive subsistences. In this darkness there comes to us light from the East, from India. It is true that Paul also hints at an identification of God with the ἄνθρωπος πνευματικός (1 Cor. 15⁴⁷), it is true that Kant endeavours to explain the marvellous phenomenon of the categorical imperative within us on the theory that the man as real ("thing in itself") lays down the law to the man as phenomenal; but how slight the significance of these timid and groping essays as compared with the profound and fundamental conception of the Vedânta, which makes its appearance everywhere in the Upanishads, that the God, the sole author of all good in us, is not as in the Old Testament a Being contrasted with and distinct from us, but rather—without impairing his absolute antagonism to the depraved self of experience (jīva)—our own metaphysical I, our divine self, persisting in untarnished purity through all the aberrations of human nature, eternal blessed,—in a word, our ātman.